The sound that you hear right now is the echo of my words as they reverberate through your mind, and if you’ve met me, you may even be hearing the nasally whine of my voice saying those words—and for this, I am sorry. I have returned to my computer typing machine and I’m embarking upon a new series of missives from the front of the war to remain a pretend bike racer. For those of you that are new to my training log, I call myself a pretend bike racer because the notion that I am anywhere near being a "serious", "professional" or "non-gassy" racer is simply preposterous. In fact, if I were to completely stop riding a bike, nothing would happen. I would get a bit pudgier, and I would have a hard time finding suitable situations for wearing my excruciatingly tight lycra wardrobe; but the rest of the world would move on without notice.

I race and train because I enjoy it, it’s as simple as that. Some people build ships in a bottle, some people garden, some people twerk, I ride a bike. And like making tiny vessels, trimming perfect hedges or getting the right amount of booty shake (one, see below for an explanation), riding a bike has its triumphs and frustrations. And it is experiencing both the ups and downs of pedaling a pile of carbon, aluminum and gossamer (What, you’re not running gossamer rims? Is your frame made of stone?) that makes the endeavor worthwhile. If it were easy, it would be power walking.

As far as training goes, I will be pedaling my bike. In order to both soothe my obsessive personalty and to appear to be competent, I will pedal at varying degrees of difficulty for varying durations; and hopefully this magic formula will hatch the egg of awesomeness that my downy rump is propped upon. (For those keeping track, that’s two backside mentions so far.)

There’s also momentous news afoot in the realm of obsessive bike data collection. I am transitioning from Strava to mapmyride. Due to the efforts of Strava-bombing KOM jackals, most everyone has stopped giving a hobo’s dump about leader boards and such. Therefore, I am going to a service that provides the same functionality, but also offers the opportunity to obsessively record each and every bit of food that I "input" into my digestive system (you didn’t think I was going to finish an entire training log without mentioning my digestive system, did you?). So, it’s goodbye Strava, hello mapmyride.

I am also announcing that I am taking the plunge into bike event promotion. As there’s not enough hair-pulling frustration in my life, I am organizing a Gran Fondo in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa. Much of the early work for this event has been explaining what the term "gran fondo" means, but loosely translated from Italian it means "potential personal financial devastation". I’m trying to pull off a big event that will traverse long distances through populated areas (yes, there populated areas in Iowa), and it can be scary at times to think about the enormity of the task ahead. So I will seek to dissipate that enormity by typing about it here and then coming back to read comments about how the gran fondo format sucks. In the meantime, visit dubuquegf.com for information or find the Dubuque Gran Fondo Facebook page to personally tell me how awful I am. I eagerly await your feedback.